Gabriel Boulianne Gobeil’s academic research investigates matters related to drone warfare, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and the ethical implications of new military technologies such as artificial intelligence. A graduate of Concordia University (BA, Political Science), the University of Ottawa (MA, Political Science), and Tel Aviv University (MA, Security and Diplomacy), he also studied International Relations at the University of Toronto. Gabriel gained practical experience in the field of security while working as an Intelligence Analyst on the Middle East and North Africa for a private security firm in Israel.

Abstract

Leadership targeting, or decapitation, which involves the removal of an organization’s leader, has been utilized in various military conflicts. The use of drones has been particularly consequential in such schemes, earning themselves the reputation of being “Washington’s weapon of choice.” The existing literature on leadership targeting gravitates around the question of the practice’s strategic effectiveness, focusing on the targeted groups’ internal characteristics to explain their (in)ability to withstand decapitation. However, this literature overlooks a key feature of terrorist groups, namely their identity’s organizational dynamics. Highlighting the importance of group identities in determining the outcome of decapitations, this article fills this void. Looking at the cases of al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sharia in Yemen, it argues that groups which have a global identity are likely to retain cohesion when their leaders are the victim of decapitation while groups whose identity stems from an ethnic or tribal lineage tend to fragment, therefore creating “veto players.”